VENICE · ITALY
A city built on water, not roads.
Gondolas on the Grand Canal, the golden mosaics of St Mark’s, cicchetti along the back canals and the glass furnaces of Murano. The lagoon islands, the great palaces, and the Veneto beyond.
Only here
Things you can only do in a city on water.
Old towns and boat trips turn up all over Italy. Being rowed down the Grand Canal by gondola, watching glass pulled glowing from a Murano furnace, and eating your way bacaro to bacaro belong to Venice alone.
Eight hundred years
A Gondola on the Canals
The gondola is built for Venice and nowhere else: flat-bottomed for the shallows, bent a few degrees out of true so a single oar drives it straight, and still shaped by hand in the few squeri left along the back canals. There is no other city you are rowed through like this.
- 1 Venice: Grand Canal Gondola Ride with App Commentary
- 2 Venice: Grand Canal by Gondola with Live Commentary
- 3 Venice: Shared Gondola Ride Across the Grand Canal
Born in fire
Glass Blown on Murano
In 1291 the Republic moved every furnace out to Murano, to keep the fires off the timber city and the trade secrets on one island. Seven centuries on, the glassblowers are still there, gathering a glowing blob from the furnace and turning it into a horse or a chandelier in a couple of minutes flat.
- 1 Boat Trip: Glimpse of Murano, Torcello & Burano Islands
- 2 Venice: Burano, Torcello & Murano Boat Tour w/Glassblowing
- 3 Venice: Murano and Burano Boat Tour with Glass Factory Visit
Bacaro to bacaro
Cicchetti and an Ombra
Venice does not really do long dinners. It does cicchetti: small plates of baccala, polpette and crostini eaten standing at the counter of a bacaro, with an ombra, a small glass of wine, in your other hand. The trick is to keep moving, one bar to the next, the way Venetians have for centuries.
- 1 Eat Like a Local: Venice 3-Hour Small-Group Food Tasting Tour
- 2 Venice: Street Food Tour with a Local Guide and Tastings
- 3 Venice Like a Local: Food, Wine & Spritz Tour with Traghetto Ride
Start here
The one nearly everyone books first.
More first days in Venice are built around this than anything else on the list.
The classics
Venice’s Most Popular Tours & Tickets
St Mark’s Basilica, the Doge’s Palace, a gondola on the Grand Canal and a day out in the lagoon. The experiences most people come to Venice for.
Where to begin
The Venice nearly everyone comes for.
St Mark’s and the Doge’s Palace, a gondola on the Grand Canal, the glass furnaces of Murano, cicchetti in the bacari and a day out in the Veneto. The handful of experiences most trips are planned around, and the best way to do each.
The heart of the city
How to do St Mark’s Square.
The Basilica, the Doge’s Palace and the Campanile stand shoulder to shoulder on one piazza, and the queues are the catch. Three ways to take it in, depending on how much you want explained and how long you are willing to wait.
The bacari
Venice eats standing up.
Forget the long sit-down dinner. The Venetian way is cicchetti: small plates of sarde in saor, baccala mantecato and crostini, eaten at the counter of a bacaro with an ombra of wine, then on to the next. A guide takes you through the right doorways in Rialto and Cannaregio, the ones with no English menu and a local crowd three deep.
Read the guide: the best food & cicchetti tours →Across the water
A lagoon full of islands.
Step onto a vaporetto and the crowds thin within minutes. Murano has blown glass since 1291, Burano paints its fishermen’s houses lobster pink and cobalt and still makes lace by hand, and grassy Torcello, the first corner of the lagoon anyone settled, keeps a thousand-year-old cathedral and its golden Madonna almost to itself.
See the lagoon island tours →The Grand Canal
Four kilometres of palace fronts.
The Grand Canal loops through the city in a great reversed S, and for six hundred years the families of the Republic lined it with their houses, more than a hundred of them, every one turned to face the water because the water was the street. Take it slow by gondola, ride the number-one vaporetto end to end, or cross where the locals do on a standing traghetto.
Cruise the Grand Canal →Carnival
The mask came long before the party.
Venetians once wore masks for months at a stretch, to gamble, to court and to do business with their faces hidden and their rank set aside. The bauta, the long-nosed plague doctor, the servant’s black moretta: in a back-street workshop you shape papier-mache over a mould and paint your own to carry home.
- 1 Venice: Carnival Mask Workshop
- 2 Venetian Carnival Mask Making Class in Venice, Italy
- 3 Venice: Venetian Masks Workshop
After dark
Vivaldi, where Vivaldi wrote it.
The Four Seasons was written here, by a red-haired priest who taught violin to the orphan girls of the Pieta. On most nights a chamber orchestra in period dress still plays it in a candlelit church or a frescoed scuola, ten minutes from wherever you are staying. For something grander, La Fenice, burned and rebuilt twice, opens its gilded boxes for an opera.
See all 17 concerts & recitals →By place
Venice, by its quarters and its water.
San Marco for the great set-pieces. The Grand Canal for the palace fronts. Rialto for the markets and the oldest streets. The lagoon islands for glass and lace. The Ghetto for quiet Cannaregio. The Veneto beyond when you want a day on dry land.
By activity
Or pick how you want to spend it.
A gondola if you want the canals. A walking tour if you want the backstreets. A cicchetti crawl if you want to eat like a local, a cooking class if you want to take it home, a concert if you want the evening. Or just skip the queues at the big two.
Plan it
Three days, done right.
First time in Venice? Here is a three-day run that takes in the icons, the canals and the lagoon without a wasted hour or a needless queue.
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